iLife: Empowering Life Insurance Agents for the 21st Century

We are incredibly excited to welcome Nelson, Amit, and the entire iLife team to the OpenView portfolio family.

At OpenView, we are committed to investing in technologies that improve people’s working lives, whether those be manufacturers, developers, knowledge workers, and in the case of iLife, life insurance agents, and their consumers. As we have been building out our emerging FinTech practice, we have also been seeking to invest in technologies that empower the existing financial systems in the US and globally. We believe today’s financial services industry needs a digital makeover. We’re even more excited when we see opportunities to apply product-led growth (PLG) models to industries that haven’t seen this before.

Insurance Agents Need a Sales Funnel Remodel

Life insurance is a massive market with nearly $2.6 trillion in global annual premiums. Over 50% of all Americans have some sort of life insurance policy and almost 30 million new policies are sold each year. Most of these policies are sold through independent agents, who remain the fastest-growing segment for how life insurance is distributed in the US.

Despite the importance of life insurance for both income protection and financial planning, life insurance is still sold in a largely analog manner. Pre-pandemic, the majority of agents spent their time on analog advertising (including park benches as shown below), networking in the community, and even door-to-door sales. As the COVID-19 pandemic shifted behavior online, agents have needed to reinvent their sales funnel for a digital buying process, facilitated by iLife.

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How iLife is Changing Life Insurance in the Digital Era

Launched in June of 2021, iLife is already used by thousands of independent agents to help them bolster their online presence, offer quotation tools and comparison shopping to consumers, and even bind and quote online, all facilitated by experienced agents who also use iLife as their agent hub for CRM, leads, and more. 

While many in the industry believe that Silicon Valley is a threat to existing industries like insurance, we believe that iLife will actually help the industry and its agents in several important ways:

• Empower the agent: iLife was built for agents. iLife’s goal is to enable and empower agents and brokers with powerful tools, and not disintermediate them as many other technologies have attempted. 

• Help agents grow their business: iLife helps agents grow their business, in some cases by 500% as the tech expands the reachable customers to all those online, vs. simply those in your neighborhood.

• Helps agents be more efficient: With less paperwork and less time talking to unqualified prospects, iLife agents can spend more time focusing on their most important prospects and customers.

• Help agents manage digital transformation: Overall, as the industry shifts online, both from younger agents entering the workforce and younger consumers becoming larger purchases of life policies, iLife helps agents manage this transition to online purchasing.

We are excited to partner with founder and CEO, Nelson Lee, who started iLife after the pain he encountered building and scaling his own tech-enabled insurance brokerage. He saw firsthand the limitations of current tools and the clear need for a more modern online distribution. Nelson decided to address the historically manual and antiquated life insurance process with a digital platform that empowers independent agents and optimizes the end-to-end sales process.

Thank you Nelson and the iLife team for the opportunity to partner together to bring life insurance into the 21st century. We look forward to the journey ahead!